23 Faces

Every night he sees 23 faces.

Anger, agony, fury, fear, exhaustion; their twisted features reveal nothing and everything. Voices scream in foreign tongues. With piercing eyes, they accuse him of committing unspeakable atrocities.

He is guilty of committing unspeakable atrocities.

The face that lingers the longest belongs to the ten-year-old boy who fired first.

The leg healed just fine. His Purple Heart lies buried somewhere in a landfill, next to broken plates and chicken bones and handwritten letters that weren’t important enough to keep.

We must stop the spread of communism, they said. We are fighting for freedom, they said.

They did not say fighting for freedom would cost him his own. They did not say that part of him would never leave Vietnam.

Although decades have passed, he’s only talked about it once. I had the privilege of listening. I had the privilege of learning I will never truly understand freedom.